Sitting Alone in a Small Room, Surrounded by Vaginas

It's a Tuesday and Carly has been showing all the textbook symptoms of being pregnant for about three or four weeks, so we have an appointment with her OBGYN physician in Bayonne. She gets the address wrong and we have to drive around a little bit until we find it, but we make it right on time. The building is a low-slung brick thing that used to be someone's house. In fact, the building still has a lot of vestiges of the former dwelling and it really does feel like you're in someone's dining room when you are filling out forms and waiting for the nurse to call you in. A few minutes later, the doctor comes into the exam room and fires up the ultrasound machine. Just seconds into the exam he says, without any deliberation at all, "You need to go to the bathroom!" Carly chuckles nervously, the doctor steps out. She throws on her jeans and exits the room quickly.

Then I'm left, sitting, alone in a small room, surrounded by vaginas.

OBGYN offices are unabashed about showing off the stuff of their trade. There are big, plastic models, posters with bas-relief displays of all the bounty of a woman's secrets. There was an interactive standing thing on the counter that advertised a new form of IUD (inter-uterine device, a contraceptive thingamajig) that has bouncing ovaries, if you jiggle it a little. The illustrations of women with cutaways, showing how the baby should be lodged in her guts, have fantastic breasts.

Then Carly and the doctor come back in, they reset the exam, and start again. After a little twisting and zooming and drawing of lines much like on an AutoCAD display, the doc steps back and says, "from what I see here, and I'm very confident about this... this is not going to be a viable pregnancy. I'm sorry." He doesn't give us enough time for it to really sink in, but Carly and I exchange meaningful glances. "Ah, shit," my eyeballs say. "Fucking hell!" says the corner of her mouth.

The doc goes on to explain that about one-in-three of all pregnancies--all known pregnancies--end up in what is called an "anembryonic" pregnancy, or a blighted ovum. That means that there was an egg/sperm collision at some point, and the thing lodged into the uterine wall, but that was it. Something wrong with the egg or sperm caused a "chromosomal failure," or some other disaster, so the cell failed to divide and that was that. The egg sac that was implanted was just a dark blob filled with some placental tissue and a few dead cells. We had one of those. Based on the size of everything, Carly was about 7-8 weeks along in the pregnancy, and there should be a little creature in there with a heartbeat and budding arms and legs and a head (no fingers yet). Instead, we got nothin'.

It's a bit of a bummer for us both. We'd gotten our hopes up quite high. Everything was textbook, it was all so damned easy! We should have known better... if it appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. But Carly and I have been lucky to find each other, we've not had to worry about our relationship like I'm sure almost everyone has in their lives, when everything is going well, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. We were optimistic. We'd forgotten our ingrained cynicism for a little bit. And... our expectations were dashed.

So, the doctor says, we have to do a reset. After this one is done away with, Carly's body will take about two months to go back to normal and we can start "playing Russian roulette" again. That was the doctor's phrase for people who get pregnant without much planning, just firing into the dark. I corrected him by saying that we prefer to think of it as "letting nature take its course."

The good news, however, is that all of our parts appear to be working in proper order. The doc said that, based on our history, Carly got pregnant with the blighted ovum within a couple of days of going off the birth control. He says that the people he worries about are the ones that can't get pregnant at all--blighted ova or not--and that we are going to have no problems getting pregnant again. The anembryonic pregnancy is just pure statistical probability, and if things work out the way he expects, the next time we are ready to get a baby in there, it should be no problem.

So yes, statistical probability may have stopped the coming apocalypse for now, but HA HA HA, fuck you, world! It is inevitable.